


Cosmic Coddiwompling

by Rocketpropelled_Taco_Van



Series: Cosmic Coddiwompling [1]
Category: Star Wars Legends - All Media Types, Star Wars Original Trilogy
Genre: Comedy, Parody
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-29
Updated: 2019-01-29
Packaged: 2019-10-18 18:40:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,172
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17586224
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rocketpropelled_Taco_Van/pseuds/Rocketpropelled_Taco_Van
Summary: Coddiwomple: (v) to travel with a sense of purpose to a vague destination.This is a story about some blokes going on a coddiwomple throughout the galaxy, and it's going to go poorly for everyone involved.





	Cosmic Coddiwompling

**Author's Note:**

> I want to explore the expanded universe while coming into contact with the plot of the films as little as possible because the stuff off screen or in the background seemed to intrigue me far more than what was going on at the center of the action. I'm trying to make sure that everything you see is in the Legends canon, so that this could be a believable piece of fiction that could have happened in the Star Wars universe and doesn't mess with the films. This isn't about Luke, Leia, or Han. We might throw some shade at them from time to time, but this isn't about them.  
> This is a love letter to the old Extended Universe.  
> This is my second attempt at this story as the first chapter of the first attempt made the protagonist seem more like a side character than the protagonist. Hopefully this fixes that problem.

 

It was a dark time for the galaxy. The Empire was beginning to swing its fists back at the Rebellion after the destruction of the Death Star. They began to clamp down on star system after star system, trying to choke out any spark of insurrection.

It was a dark time for me as well. I was an intern for a mining company on Quiberon V, a Gamorean mining colony, pushing numbers through antiquated computers for one of the many different mining companies on that turd of a planet. They didn’t even name the planet. They just gave it a number and stripped it of any good or useful resource they could find. By now, most good things were on that planet were gone.

My name is Pantaloon McFanficface. When this all started for me, I was 21, on my fourth internship on Quibby Vee, and completely unaware of much of the news of the war. I was dreadfully skinny at the time. I had a mop of curly brown hair framing my thin face and what I’m sure was the only pair of glasses in the galaxy, black spectacles with lenses as thick as I was thin. I tried wearing bulky pleather jackets and baggy pants to make myself look more formidable. It only made me look shiftier, like I had illicit drugs tucked away in all those pockets. I couldn’t afford illicit drugs, given that some days I could hardly afford food.

That day was a Saturday, a weekend break from all of the work I had to do. I was lying on the bed of my dusty apartment watching the dust particles drift this way in the sunbeams that came through the blinds on the windows. This was one of the more entertaining things to do in my apartment, and, while I desperately wanted to do anything else, I continued to stare at floating dust until the clouds rolled in. Then I stared at sedentary dust resting on the blinds.

A grumbling stomach finally broke my attention. Realizing that I had forgotten to eat, I trudged myself over to the small kitchen and began to search for food. I found plenty of seasonings and sauces that I never got around to using, but nothing of actual substance. Resigned to finding food elsewhere, I walked downstairs to my speeder. Speeder wasn’t exactly an apt description of it. This thing was a box, with a slight skew to make it slightly more aerodynamic. It wasn’t even a fun box, like those hippie transport speeders. This thing was about 5 cubic meters of slow, that I had tried to make somewhat faster. I only ended up making it louder, but the loudness made it feel faster. I struggled with the door for a moment, opened it, hopped in, and hit the red START button on the dashboard. The trundler rumbled itself to life. The engine popped and crackled. The popping was normal, but the crackling was new. As I put it into reverse, and backed out of my parking space, the crackling became loud random snaps. The lights on the dashboard flickered with each one.

“Please don’t,” I whined looking down at the steering wheel as if that were the trundler’s face. I flipped a few switches disabling the aftermarket superturbo-induction-lasers and the snapping subsided into its crackling again. I breathed a somewhat relieved sigh. “It’s just the cables. I can afford that.” I reassured myself. “I can afford that, and I can do that.” I froze. “Can I afford that?” I scrambled for my wallet opened it up and counted the coins. Another sigh. “I can afford that.”

I drove my trundler to the array of docking bays at the local space port where I was hoping to scrounge some cables from the scrapped parts that careless pilots and traders would leave behind. That’s how I got most of the parts for the trundler, and probably why it was always falling apart, but it’s less expensive than buying parts, at least for the time being.

I pulled up to one of the hangars that seemed to be the best for spare parts near the back of the spaceport and parked near the edge of the hangar. In the center of the hangar was an HWK-290, a birdlike light freighter, that had a duck crudely painted across the port “beak” of the ship. If you take a look at one, you’ll see what I mean. About 25 meters away from the ship was a pallet full of plastoid crates. A human carried the crates, one by one, up the gangway and into the ship. Trying not to attract much attention I found the trash parts bin and started to scrounge through it, before-

“Hey kid, help me load these boxes onto my ship!” The pilot called out to me. He gestured with his head toward his ship as he picked up a plastoid crate from a pallet.

“Umm uhh s-sure.” I stuttered and walked over to pick up a crate because what was I going to say? No? I was a thin little kid, and this dude looked the business, like the kind of guy who knew his way around the galaxy. His face sported a number of scars and a somewhat maintained beard. He wore a ragtag hodgepodge collection of armor pieces over mechanic’s coveralls and a bulky pistol at his side, all of which had clearly seen action. I grabbed a crate, which turned out to be heavier than I would normally be able to carry, but the fear of disappointing Mr. Murderface gave me strength, and hauled it up the gangplank. Onboard was a Bothan who was sliding the crates from wherever the human dropped them into a more organized arrangement.

“So Kad roped you into helping?” the Bothan asked as I set the crate down with a thud at the top of the walkway. I muttered some kind of affirmative answer, like yeah, but with even less energy. “He does that sometimes,” the bothan responded.

I continued to help ferry crate after crate into the cargo hold of the ship. The Bothan introduced himself as Keechi and told me that the crates were filled with food going to refugees somewhere in the galaxy.

“Keechi,” Kad, previously known as Mr. Murderface, called from the bottom of the gangplank. “We’ve got a friend who’s come to see us.”

“Ooh! I wonder who it is!” Keechi smiled and turned started toward the gangplank before stopping to address me. “Umm… just uh…” Keechi fumbled with his words as he looked around the interior of the ship “Chill here, take a break. I think we’ve got some drinks and snacks in the fridge. Just… if it looks expensive, I’d stay away from it because it might actually kill you.” With that, the bothan turned and walked down the gangplank.

When he reached the bottom, he noticed Kad had stopped hauling crates. He also noticed that there was a human wearing worn down armor and a cybernetic eye leaning on the two crates that were left on the pallet.

“So, who’s this friend?” Keech asked.

“He’s not…” Kad let out an exasperated sigh. “This is Boonti Theraaz.”

“Bounty hunter extraordinaire,” the man next to the crates said with an extravagant bow. He had a grizzled face, older and more murdery than Kad’s. This was helped by the fact that his hair was almost entirely grey save for some touches of black, and his right eye was a cybernetic contraption that looked like it had been cobbled together from droid parts. It twisted and turned in its charred crater of a socket.

“And he’s brought some Imperial friends,” Kad said, gesturing to the half dozen Stormtroopers behind Boonti. Keech frumpled his mouth and did some mental calculations before he opened it again.

“Oh! You were being facetious!” Keechi said, finally getting a grasp on the situation.

“Yes, Keech. I was being facetious because Boonti is here to kill us.”

“Not kill,” the man interrupted. “Not necessarily. I can take you in alive. It’s just that the Empire is cracking down on smugglers, y’know, after the whole Death Moon thing.”

“Death Moon?” Kad asked.

“It was an Imperial base,” Boonti said. “Some smuggler from Tattooine got in using stolen plans and screwed around with it, and then they blew it up. Something like that. Did you not hear about it? I guess it’s still classified.” One of the Stormtroopers smacked Boonti on the arm with the back of his hand. “OW! Yeah, I guess it’s still classified. So, what do you have in these crates?” The bounty hunter gestured toward the crates he was leaning on. “Bombs? Blasters? Stolen Imperial data-tapes?”

“Food, actually.” Kad said levelling a glare at the bounty hunter. “Food for people being held hostage in their own homes by an illegal Imperial blockade.”

“Really!” The bounty hunter chuckled. “Quite the philanthropist. Now, which Imperial blockade would that be?”

“This one,” Kad growled, before he swiftly snatched his blaster pistol from its holster, aimed it at the crates, and fired.

Meanwhile, inside the ship, I was sitting on a well-loved sofa drinking some sweet, sweet blue milk and munching on some taquito things when I heard an earthshattering kaboom from outside, followed by a cacophony of blaster fire. I decided to stay exactly where I was.

Outside, there was a crater where the crates were, Boonti was nowhere to be found, and while most of the initial Stormtroopers had been dispatched, more were beginning to run into the hangar.

“I think we should get a move on,” Kad shouted as he expertly drilled a Stormtrooper through the face with a blaster bolt.

“Sounds like a good idea,” Keechi hollered back over the sound of his small blaster rifle spewing red hot death at pretty much anything that moved and sometimes even hitting the intended target. He turned and darted up the ramp and into the cockpit of the ship, jumped into the pilot’s seat and smacked the big red button labeled “START” that was welded onto an empty spot on the control panel and shoddily wired in. The lights and dials on the dashboard flickered to life, followed by the engines. Keech jumped out of the pilot’s seat and plopped into the copilot’s seat just as Kad ran into the cockpit, hopped into his chair, and grabbed the steering yoke. He maneuvered the ship so that it faced the gaping maw of the hangar and then he slammed the throttle to full. The craft blasted its way out of the hangar and made its way skyward. The overcast grey skies of Quiberon V gave way to a heavenly celestial blue, which then gave way to the inky black depths of space, where the crew of smugglers was confronted with a handful of beat up old CEC Consular-Class cruisers facing them down.

“Local bulk cruisers,” Keech said. “Likely hired by the Empire.”

“I guess this smuggling crackdown is bigger than I thought. Those are probably crawling with Stormtroopers, bounty hunters, and all kinds of imperialist trash. Let’s just jump to hyperspace. They couldn’t keep up if they wanted to, anyway.”

“Gotcha, making the jump.” Keech pulled a series of levers. The stars around them blurred into long glowing streaks before the ship rocketed into hyperspace. “They’re no match for the crew of the Centennial Duck! By the way, what’s a duck?”

“A duck?” Kad responded. “It’s a bird, but it’s got like a flat beak, and instead of singing, like normal birds, they just go ‘KWAKWAKWAKWAKWAK!’”

“That would help if I knew what any of what you said meant.”

“What do you mean? You don’t know what a bird is?”

“No!”

“Oh… it’s like a bat, but it’s got feathers instead of fur and skin.”

“Don’t know what a bat is, either.”

“It’s ummm… it’s like a mynock, but not absolutely disgusting.”

“Nope. Don’t know what that is either.”

“Dammit! It’s like a thing… with wings… that flies. Did you live under a rock or something?”

“YES! We’ve talked about this!”

“Oh.” Kad paused. “Right, I forgot about that.”

There was a brief silence before a very confused and scared Pantaloon walked in, cup of blue milk in shaking in my hands.

“Ummmm guys… where are you taking me?”

Kad put his face in his hands. “You’re still here!?”

“To be fair,” Keechi countered. “There really wasn’t anywhere for him to go.”

Kad sat with his face resting in his hands for a moment.

“I can, umm…” I tried to think of some kind of solution to the problem that I could offer even though I had no idea what he could do to return myself to Quiberon V without inconveniencing these people.

“You know what?” Kad said with a sudden resolve as he stood from his chair. “You’re hired. I’m Commander Kad Zabron, this is my copilot, Keechi Nondaz, and you’re our new accidental intern! Welcome to the crew of the Centennial Duck!”


End file.
